Lavoir

Description: Several years ago I came across a book in a bookstore that had some images of Lavoirs from France. I really liked the architecture and the romanticized idea of people in a community gathering at their town’s lavoir to clean their laundry and themselves etc. The idea to create a rendering of a lavoir has stuck with me since then but until recently I didn’t own a computer powerful enough to render to the level of detail that I had in mind. I also lacked free time to do a project like this since my professional work keeps me pretty busy. Things slowed down recently and I saw an opportunity and I took it.

The project took roughly 3 weeks to create. I wanted to achieve a high level of photo realism for the scene. I decided that every object would go through a sculpting phase in mudbox to get really fine displacement detail on them. If memory became a problem I could generate normal maps instead. Fortunately, I had enough RAM to displace every architectural object. So no bump mapping was used at all in this render. It was also important to me that all of the textures had no seams and that they had dirt and grime that would realistically line up from one separate object to another. To do this I taught myself Mari. Nearly all texturing was done using Mari for this scene and the few textures that weren’t were created in Nuke. Photoshop (for the first time in my career) was not used at all for this project. I rendered a lot of different buffers for this project because I wanted to have as much control as possible in the comp. In the end I didn’t end up making very big changes. Most of the look was in the render itself. Just small color fixes and adding lightwraps and fringing.